Related patents and patent applications to the present application are U.S. Pat. No. 4,005,745 issued on Feb. 11, 1977; U.S. Patent Applications Ser. No. 707,048 filed July 20, 1976; Ser. No. 710,697 filed Aug. 2, 1976; Ser. No. 758,454 filed Jan. 11, 1977, and Ser. No. 758,455 filed Jan. 11, 1977.
There has existed for a long time a need for an efficient, easy to operate food preparation apparatus and process which prepares nutritional and appetizing meals for hospital patients and other institutional patients, airline passengers, as well as for groups of people such as field or factory workers who are isolated from restaurants or food dispensing outlets.
Needless to say, a great deal of work has been done in this area in an attempt to achieve an acceptable and satisfactory food preparation system. However, they all have serious disadvantages or are not sufficiently sophisticated to accomplish the many aspects required by a system or apparatus for producing nutritional, wholesome, appetizing meals. Some of these known devices require separate insulated cabinets in which hot and cold foods are separately confined. To assemble a meal the attendant must select hot dishes from one compartment and cold dishes from the other and place them on a suitable tray. This is time consuming and could lead to mistakes in the required menu. Another system allows for fully assembled meal trays but has no provision for reheating or cold maintenance of the food and simply stores the food in an insulated unit. Food stored in such a manner can maintain hot food hot and the cold food cold only for a limited time.
Another system provides insulated dishes with integral heaters for heating and holding the hot portions of the meal. In certain of these systems the dish, after it has been heated in a separate unit must be assembled on a tray containing the chilled portions of the meal. In other systems, the food to be heated and the chilled food items are assembled on a single tray within a refrigerated unit, and electrical connections on the dish must mate with connections on the tray which makes connections with the unit. The dish is then surrounded by air insulated barrier which blocks off the chilled air from the heated dishes. Flavor and nutritional values are readily destroyed with such a system.
In certain of the known systems wherein both food items to be served hot and cold are stored on a single tray and the cumbersome insulated integral heating dishes are used, the attendant must come along at the proper time and press certain buttons to initiate the heating process and then must be required to manually terminate the heating after the items are cooked. This is extremely disadvantageous knowing that different foods to be cooked require different heating times and temperatures.
In addition to the prior art cited or brought to the Examiner's attention in the above three noted patent applications the following art was considered with respect to the present invention U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,908,749, 2,198,239, 3,156,102, 3,392,943, 3,872,686, 3,814,492, 2,778,206, 3,707,317, 2,872,792, 3,752,640, 2,439,487, 3,924,100, 3,836,220, 3,632,968, 2,634,589, 3,895,215, 3,255,812, 3,336,432, 2,914,927, 3,261,650, 2,568,493, 3,969,969, 2,293,316.